 No Friends but the Mountains
John Bulloch,
Harvey Morris
Viking
Penguin Books Ltd
The allied assault to free Kuwait from Iraqi domination was supposed to herald a new world order in which the United States and the Soviet Union would together maintain the peace and protect minorities. It failed the first test when the Shia of southern Iraq and the Kurds in the north of the country responded to what they believed had been a call from President Bush to overthrow the tyrant Saddam Hussein. They rose up against their oppressor and waited for the help they expected. But nothing happened, and only the anger of people around the world forced governments to act as the Kurds fled retribution in one of the greatest mass migrations of modern times.
For the Kurds, it was one more betrayal in a long series of disappointments. Spread over five countries, numbering some sixteen million, they have always been divided among themselves, exploited by rival rulers who have used them as border troops, guerrilla fighters in a war with history. They were pawns in the struggle when the Ottomans and Safavids vied for control of their vital middle lands; they were in the thick of the battles as the Ottomans and Arabs sought domination; and they saw their best hope of statehood disappear after they had heeded the Sultan’s call for a jihad in World War I.
President Woodrow Wilson promised them their country in 1918, but the British and French, abetted by emergent Turkey, frustrated the liberal American idea. Revolts and insurrections followed in Iraq, Iran and Turkey, savagely ...
John Bulloch is a frequent writer and broadcaster on the Middle East, and has written a number of books on the area. He lived in Beirut as Middle East correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, and has been diplomatic correspondent of the BBC World Service, Middle East editor of the Independent, and diplomatic editor of the Independent on Sunday.
Harvey Morris worked on local newspapers after leaving university, then joined Reuters news agency, and was chief correspondent in Tehran in 1979 and in Beirut in 1980. He joined the Independent when the paper was founded in 1986, first as an assistant foreign editor, then becoming Middle East editor, and is now deputy foreign editor.
Bulloch and Morris have previously collaborated in writing The Gulf War: The History of the Iran-Iraq Conflict, and the bestselling Saddam’s War: The Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait and the International Response.
Contents
List of Illustrations / vii
Authors’ Note / ix
Acknowledgements / xi
Map of Kurdistan / xii
1 The Uprising / 1
2 Safe Haven / 26
3 The Origins of the Kurds / 50
4 The Great Betrayal / 73
5 The Republic of Mahabad / 98
6 The Struggle for Autonomy / 119
7 The Incident at Halabja / 142
8 The Mountain ‘Turks’ / 166
9 Murder in Vienna / 191
10 The Tribe and the Nation / 217
Index / 239
List of Illustrations1. Mullah Mustafa Barzani with his aides (courtesy of the KDP, London) 2. Guerrillas of the PKK attend a lecture in the Bekaa valley (Hampar Narguizian, London) 3. Camp inside Turkey for Kurdish refugees (Bob Collier/Times Newspapers) 4. Burial of the dead at the height of the Exodus from Iraq in 1991 (Derek Hudson/Sygma) 5. Two PKK guerrillas in training (Hampar Narguizian) 6. Massoud Barzani (Jasem / Safir-Rea) 7. Jalal Talabani (Patrick Robert / Sygma) 8. Pictures of Saddam Hussein used as targets (Susan Meiselas / Magnum) 9. Abdolrahman Qassemlou (J. Pavlovsky / Sygma) 10. Poison gas dropped on Halabja (Sygma) 11. The long trek to safety (Aral / Sipa / Rex)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Our thanks are due to many people who have helped us with this book, but particularly to Ali Hassan, deputy head of the KDP office in Qamishli, Syria, who made it possible for us to travel into Kurdistan, and to see at first hand what was happening in those desperate days at the end of the Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq.
We are also most grateful to Siyamend Othman for allowing us to draw on the deep knowledge and research shown in his thesis Contribution Historique a l’Etude du Parti Dimokrat i Kurdistan i Iraq, published by l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1985, and to the staff of the Kurdish Institute in Paris for assistance in using its extensive library.
Hoshyar Zebari, a member of the Central Committee of the KDP and European representative of the party, was generous with his time and illuminating with his personal recollections of many of the great events of Iraqi Kurdistan in recent years.
In earlier times we were greatly helped by officials in Iran, Iraq and Turkey, where we always found Kurdish leaders in all those countries to be courteous, understanding and realistic about their own situation.
All these and many others have given us valuable information, or have helped us with explanations and forecasts. We emphasize, however, that the interpretations and judgements, and any mistakes, are entirely our own.
London and Oxford, 1991
Chapter One
The UprisingShortly before five on the afternoon of 29 March 1991 Massoud Barzani, fourth son of the legendary Mullah Mustafa and commander-in-chief of the Kurdish insurgent forces in northern Iraq, emerged from the guest house at Salahuddin which he had so recently commandeered from Saddam Hussein, posed briefly for a final photograph, climbed into his white super-saloon Toyota and drove away from the hill resort for a council of war with his rebel commanders. Kirkuk, the chief town of southern Kurdistan and the biggest prize that had been won in seven decades of almost uninterrupted Kurdish rebellion against Baghdad, had fallen to government troops the previous night after little more than a week in rebel hands. Arbil, at the edge of the plain 10 miles below Salahuddin, was surrounded by Saddam’s forces on two sides. The first refugees, travelling in trucks, cars and even in the buckets of bulldozers, were beginning to clog the roads to the mountains and the relative safety of the Turkish and Iranian borders. The Kurdish uprising, which in barely three weeks had succeeded in routing the Iraqi leader’s forces from one fifth of Iraqi territory, was virtually at an end. Barzani and his commanders were contemplating the collapse of the most dramatic, though short-lived, victory in modern Kurdish history. Yet even when the Kurds were forced to accept a formal ceasefire on 11 April, Barzani’s forces still controlled more territory than his father had managed to secure at the height of his powers in the early 1970s. What was more, the vast exodus of up to three million Kurds fleeing the anticipated …
John Bulloch
Harvey Morris
No Friends but the Mountains
The Tragic History of the Kurds
Viking
Viking
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 17 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harraondsworth, Middlesex,
England First Published 1992
10 987654321
Copyright © John Bulloch and Harvey Morris, 1992
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,
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Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover photographs: Rex Features
Viking
Penguin Books Ltd
Harmondsworth
Middlesex
England
ISBN 0-670-84323-7
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